Wednesday, May 7, 2014

A couple of days ago I had a short conversation about a company insourcing IT systems previously outsourced. IT is like other professional environments. There are strategies changing not really for technical reasons but only because they look cool according to the fashion of the moment.

I.e.: the very first modern IT operating architecture was a monumental mainframe connected to several dumb terminals. A central empowered intelligence organized in virtual machines to serve several applications assigning dynamically computational resources (are you so old to know what MVS/VMS mean?).
After, this kind of organization, probably also due to high maintenance costs, started to appear a bit fascist and every desk has been equipped with its own workstation. It can be considered the SUN/SGI/HP anarchist golden age when every hippie owned his/her "root" password to precipitate SAs groups in the worst nightmare of IT era.
Currently, a central intelligence distributing resources to (not so, but almost) dumb terminals looks cool again. So we have rack mounted blade servers running virtual servers in a way that not differs so much from MVS mainframes.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Last Friday I was informed that the paper describing my e2Call research submitted to 10th ITS European Congress has been accepted as an "Interesting and timely topic". So it will be necessary some work to prepare the final paper submission that will be published in the online congress proceedings.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

As described in one of my previous posts, being a system administrator in the IT business world is not like to supervise an assembly line.
A software development factory or a data center offering IT services are very complex systems with many unpredictable events to manage and control.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

As I wrote in my previous post, capacity planning for IT business is a real challenge. There are no reasons to make it harder than it already is.

For this reason, you have to keep in mind that capacity planning isn't some kind of esoteric guess, but only a disciplined engineering procedure.

Yes, I know. Appearing like a kind of Computer Guru making predictions with a four cpus Glass Ball can be really helpful in dating ladies. The scientific approach in analyzing reality hasn't the same appeal. Unfortunately our first duty is to serve IT business, so the work has to follow a well disciplined procedure.

Monday, January 27, 2014

As I wrote in past, I used to help Police work in specific investigations where a mix of knowledge between the military and information technology was required.

Encryption wasn't born with computers. It is an ancient discipline and one of the best lessons of my professional life comes from a 72 years old, almost illiterate, mafia boss.

Previous investigations had shown that this person had been able to give orders to his organization when he was serving a life sentence under the strong controls provided by prison in solitary confinement rules of Italian Article 41-bis prison regime.

Friday, January 24, 2014

This is the first, and I hope not the last, of several posts that I want to write about the activity that I consider the "state of art" for a System Administrator: the capacity planning.

As every activity that tries to define the complex systems behavior in the future, capacity planning requires deep knowledge, discipline, science, a great experience and a bit of luckiness. Is not easy to find all these stuff in just one person, especially the last. So, in every company, there are many programmers, some SA's and just few capacity planners.